ODU's Tolk Invited to Meet with Australian Government Officials for Discussion of M&S Industry
June 12, 2012
Old Dominion University's Andreas Tolk, a worldwide expert in the issue of standardization of interoperability in modeling and simulation, has been invited to a private dinner with Jack Snelling, minister for defence industries for the state of South Australia.
The exclusive dinner, which is scheduled for June 18 in conjunction with SimTecT, the leading modeling and simulation conference held annually in the South Pacific, will feature a discussion of South Australia's vision for a sustainable modeling and simulation industry with Snelling and other state government officials.
SimTecT, being held this year in Adelaide, Australia, attracts more than 450 attendees from around the world.
A professor of engineering management and systems engineering in ODU's Frank Batten College of Engineering and Technology, Tolk said Asian governments are wrestling with a change in the dynamics of the modeling and simulation industries that will accompany the U.S. Department of Defense reallocation of its research and development dollars.
"The U.S. is reorganizing its defense expenditure in that part of the world," Tolk said. "It's caused countries like Australia and South Korea to look into their modeling and simulation industries, which are heavily dependent on U.S. military investment, and figure out how regional centers and universities can take over that responsibility."
SimTecT will feature discussion of simulation issues in areas such as defense, education, emergency management and transportation. Tolk will conduct a workshop on interoperability frameworks: "Designing Models and Simulations to be interoperable and Composable in the First Place."
His presentation in Australia is just one stop during a summer of worldwide travel for Tolk. Shortly after returning to the United States, he will go to his native Germany, where he will present his research at an Operations Research symposium in Bonn, sponsored by the German Association for Defence Technology. Operations research is a science that applies analytical methods to improve decision-making and reduce complexity of multidisciplinary operations, and Tolk will discuss his model-theoretical framework for modeling and simulation-based systems engineering at the symposium.
The conference is an international information platform for decision makers and experts from politics, the military, embassies, academia and the civil service, sharing information about the latest developments and initiatives in the field.
Finally, in August, Tolk will travel to Daejeon, Korea, to give four lectures at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology about combat modeling and simulation, based on the textbook he published about the discipline earlier this year.
The 936-page book, "Engineering Principles of Combat Modeling and Distributed Simulation," is published by Wiley, and is available in electronic format on Kindle and Nook. The book addresses the challenges of combat modeling and distributed simulation, covering the foundations of the topic, and discusses modeling of the environment, movement, sensing and effects, while also addressing standards for distributed simulation.